In recent years, physically handicapped individuals have aggressively sought to enjoy and challenge life to the fullest extent possible considering their individual situations. For many such individuals, an important aspect of their lifestyles has included serious participation in athletic competitions, and these competitions have developed to the extent that Handicapped Olympics were held in Seoul, Korea, shortly after the traditional Olympic Games, a tradition which may be expected to continue and expand. Local, regional, national and international games for the handicapped are now common, and the level of competition and accomplishments which have been attained are a source of wonder to the public at large and well deserved pride to the handicapped athletes.
One class of competition is wheelchair racing in which events ranging from short sprints to full marathons (often ran concurrently on the same course with the conventional marathon). As those skilled in the art will appreciate, the times of the handicapped athletes, particularly in the longer races such as the marathon, are often better than those of the unhandicapped athletes.
For the most part, participants in wheelchair races have employed fairly conventional racing chairs which have been carefully prepared by ensuring very free rotation of the wheels, a comfortable seat, stability, ease of accessing the wheel drive rings (typically by applying a radical camber to the large wheels), etc. Steering has been accomplished by more or less conventionally by momentarily introducing a deliberate differential into the rotation rates of the two large wheels, the small wheels being eccentrically pivoted to simply follow the path of the wheelchair in the conventional fashion to thus continue their normal function of providing overall stability to the wheelchair.
However, as the level of performance has increased, it has become evident that even fairly radically modified conventional wheelchairs are themselves the source of equipment imposed limitations on the times which can be attained. The stability and steering of the chair as well as the fixed and relatively high position of the athlete in the chair have constituted decided problem areas, and it is to addressing these problem areas in racing wheelchairs that my invention is directed.